Christmas Eve 2009 Message

Again and again he tries.  Each time, he knows he will succeed.  Though he’s failed every time in the past, this time will be different.  He approaches the ball… and it’s yanked out from under him.  Have you ever felt like Charlie Brown?  You’ve tried so hard, but things aren’t going like you expected them to go.  You didn’t plan them out this way?

When I was entering the final quarter of my senior year of college, I had my life all planned out.  I was going to graduate college and get married.  Then I was going to continue my education at Indiana University, where I would get my master’s degree in Education, after which I would get a job, where I would teach high school German and coach soccer.  I had everything planned out. To make a long story short, things didn’t work out like I had planned. My fiancé and I broke up, and the last place I wanted to be was where she was, so I didn’t go to grad school.  Life didn’t turn out at all like I had planned.

I’m not the only one who has had life not turn out like I had planned it.  When we look at the situation in Luke 2, we see a life that hadn’t turned out at all like people had planned.  Israel, from its very inception, was meant to be God’s chosen people.  God called Abraham to leave his home and his family and to go to the land He would show him.  God told him this:  I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you.  I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you. Genesis 12:2-3.

Then in Exodus 19, Moses went up on Mount Sinai to talk with God.  God told him that they would be His treasured possession.  Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. (Exodus 19:6).

But here we are, years and years later, and Israel isn’t a great nation.  They don’t seem to be mediating between God and humanity.  In fact, since the time of Abraham, they’ve mostly seen others rule over them.  Whether it was Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, or now Rome, someone else had been ruling over them for most of their history. Apart from a brief rebellion over 150 years earlier, they had been under the rule of other nations for hundreds of years. This didn’t seem like the place of a great nation.

As if it weren’t bad enough to be ruled by another nation, they were under the thumb of a Roman ruler who called himself a god.  And this year, Caesar Augustus was requiring all of his subjects to return to their hometowns to be counted.  There were only two reasons for an emperor to call for a census: first of all, to demonstrate to the world how powerful they were. By showing how many people were in his empire, Caesar could show that he was the most powerful man on earth.  The second reason for a census was to help an emperor know how much he should or could be collecting in taxes.  Mighty Rome would crush you if you didn’t pay your taxes. Meanwhile, you have Israel, barely more than a blip on Rome’s radar screen, mostly doing whatever it took to not be noticed.

This wasn’t how Israel had planned it.  They were supposed to be a great nation, not bowing to another nation and paying tribute or taxes.  I can’t even imagine the corporate morale of Israel.

And in this Christmas story, we meet the shepherds.  Now to know who they were, you have to know something about the economy of the ancient near east.  Shepherds were not landowners.  They weren’t even sheep-owners.  They were peasants at best.  Overall they weren’t concerned with the political situation of Israel.  They were most concerned with subsistence.  They just wanted to make enough to keep themselves and their families alive.  Talk about a blip on the radar screen; they weren’t even on the screen.

They remind me of a certain class of kids I went to high school with.  Now I went to a large high school with about 500 in each class, and there were a number of cliques.  I remember one kid, I’ll call him Jimmy, who started out trying to fit in with the “preps”. He tried his best to dress the part, but the rich kids wouldn’t have any thing to do with him.  Then he was trying to fit in with the athletes, but he wasn’t athletic enough, so they didn’t accept him either.  Next he was riding a skateboard and trying to hang out with that crowd, but they called him a “poser” and wouldn’t accept him either.  Finally Jimmy ended up with the “hoods” – the longhaired smoker kids who wore leather jackets and congregated outside behind the school before and after class.  They were almost always under the radar.  One classmate of mine wore a blatantly obscene t-shirt all day in school, and not one teacher even noticed.  Even as a teenager, I was convinced that adults purposely ignored their entire group.  This is where Jimmy ended.  He was in the same kind of social status as were the shepherds. In fact Jewish rabbis considered shepherds to not only be smelly and dirty, but also untrustworthy.

This wasn’t the lot in life they’d chosen.  In fact, they weren’t much different from Jimmy.  Much like he went from clique to clique, trying to fit, in the shepherds’ initial goal wasn’t to become a shepherd. The goal of any young man in Israel was to become a rabbi.  Every Jewish boy studied Torah and if he was good enough, he presented himself to the rabbi.  If the rabbi didn’t accept him, then he either went to a lesser rabbi or went home to follow his father’s trade.  Some young men, however, didn’t have the option of leaving home to try to follow a rabbi.  They were too necessary at home; if they left home, their family starved.  Their fathers didn’t have a trade to teach them.  All they had was their position as a shepherd, looking after someone else’s sheep.  Dirty, smelly, dumb animals.

This is where we find the shepherds that night.

Then you have Mary and Joseph.  I’ve never been pregnant, but I understand that even with today’s comfortable means of transportation, travelling when 9 months pregnant is horrible.  Can you imagine Mary’s discomfort?  Especially because of the reason for their need to travel.  It wasn’t to be with family when the baby was born; they had to travel so Rome could count them and most likely increase their taxes.  Just another reminder that they weren’t free.  And then they showed up in Joseph’s hometown and there was no room for them. 

Now most of our Christmas pageants like to vilify an “innkeeper” who turned this couple out into the cold, but in reality, it was worse than that.  The Greek word katalumen, which we sometimes see translated “inn” also means “guest room.”  Bethlehem was not the size of town to have a real “inn” and most homes of that time period would have been equipped with a guest room, for showing hospitality was not just encouraged; it was required.  But the guest room of Joseph’s family home was already full.  I remember travelling with Tara when she was pregnant. We went to visit friends in Texas.  They demanded that we stay in their room, and they slept in the living room.  That’s hospitality.  I wonder if the “no room” mandate came down because of the “condition” of Joseph’s fiancé… After all, none of them had been visited by an angel to explain the whole “Spirit of God” thing...

This wasn’t the way they had intended to start their married life or their family.  I’m sure they had things planned out differently than this.  They would have a normal wedding, complete with the whole party thing, and then when the time was right, they would have children, hopefully a son who would follow Joseph and learn carpentry.

Instead, they were out in the attached barn, and instead of a clean room and a clean cradle, their baby was laid in a manger.  Not the way anyone expected the Son of God to be born.  The Messiah, promised of old.  Here are the words of the angel Gabriel, when he had told Mary about this miraculous birth: He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end. Luke 1:32-33.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t royal babies supposed to be born in palaces?  I can’t imagine what could have been going through Mary and Joseph’s minds about now.  Life hadn’t turned out like they had planned.

There they were: over the past 400 years, God had been silent.  Israel was ruled by Rome, and they were being counted so Caesar Augustus could know how powerful he was and so he could raise taxes.   Shepherds, the lowest rung on the social ladder, out in the fields, hoping to earn enough so their families didn’t starve.  Mary and Joseph, with their baby laid in a manger.  If you didn’t know the rest of the story, you might even think that God had abandoned them.

Have you ever been there?

But God had never left.  God had never abandoned them.  Way back in their history, as he handed over leadership of Israel, Moses had told Joshua, “the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:6).  This is still true.  God has never left us.  In fact, the Christmas story is proof.  It’s proof that in spite of the worst possible circumstances, God is still God, and he is still with us.

Rome.  Rome was so powerful, and Caesar considered himself to be a god. But Psalm 33:16 reminds us: No king is saved by the size of his army; no warrior escapes by his great strength.

Not an army.  Not political strength.  Not an emperor, king, or president.  Even in the face of persecution, God is glorified.  Jesus pronounced those who are persecuted as “blessed” – and goes another step to declare that theirs is the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:10). 

Though it looks like things aren’t what you might have planned them, you might just be in the center of God’s will.  In fact, the Greek Empire, who overran Israel before Rome did, provided the language much of the New Testament was written in, a common language through which someone like the Apostle Paul could communicate all over the ancient near east.  Rome provided reliable roads to carry the Good News all over the known world.  Even when Rome began persecuting Christians, trying to wipe them out, it merely scattered them… and the Good News of Jesus Christ was spread throughout the world. 

The shepherds, those who had drawn a poor lot in life, were visited personally by God’s angel.  Can you imagine this?  Everyone would just automatically expect God to appear to the high priest or at least to priests or to the temple workers. The elite, after all, most deserve to see God, don’t they?  But God shows his love for the least and the lost by coming to the shepherds of all people.  They got to be the first to see the Messiah, the promised one, the King whose reign will never end.  They got to be the ones who first shared the good news.  They glorified and praised God, because they had seen Jesus, the savior of the world! 

As for Mary and Joseph, their forced, painful journey to Bethlehem, the stigma of being unwed parents disappeared in the glory of being chosen to be parents to the Son of God.  Mary got it right when she said that [God] has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me – holy is his name. Luke 1:48-49.  Even their travel to the tiny town of Bethlehem, mandated by the Roman emperor, provided fulfillment of prophecy. The Prophet Micah had written: But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times. Micah 5:2.

As for you.  Things might not be going like you had planned them.  You might be wondering where God is in the midst of your troubles.  It can be hard to see the big picture when you’re in the middle of the little picture.  But a look at the Christmas story is a reminder that God is with us.  To look at Rome is to look at a historical empire, not a current one. Our brothers and sisters around the world who are suffering government-sponsored persecution just because they worship Jesus Christ are reminded that Rome seemed all powerful at the time of the birth of Jesus, but some 400 years later, Rome was sacked and the Roman Empire fell.  But the baby who was born in the manger, the Son of the Most High, rules over a kingdom that will never end.

To look at the shepherds is to be reminded that God has a special love for the least and the lost. God showed up in a special way to the shepherds, and if you are down and out, if you are at your wits end, if you are at rock bottom, God has a special love for you.  It is you to whom he gives His kingdom. 

To look at Mary and Joseph is to be reminded that sometimes things don’t pan out like you’d planned it, but God has something much bigger and better in store.  Like my college story.  I left off by telling you that things hadn’t worked out like I planned.  Truthfully, in hindsight, I am so glad! I can’t imagine how things would have gone had I followed my plan.  I don’t think I ever would have followed God’s call into ministry, and God has blessed me and my family more generously than I ever would have imagined. 

You see, sometimes we get so focused on our plans and how we want things to go, and we come to God and tell him, “I accept you – now walk alongside me” and we continue along the path we’ve set out before us.  That’s not the message of the Bible. That’s not Christianity.  That’s just selfish sinfulness wearing a Jesus mask.

So today and from now on, instead of going your own way and then focusing on how things haven’t gone to your plan, let’s focus on God’s plan.  Let’s give up our agendas and live according to Jesus Christ’s.   This is truly living a life that matters. And it’s Jesus’ Christmas gift to us.